One of the most common refrains of people who discuss the topic of enshittification is that so much stuff related to tech just flat-out doesn't work any more, and no-one seems in any great hurry to fix it — particularly when all the actually knowledgeable engineers have been replaced with "vibe-coding" cunts.
Here is a list of tech-related things that, through no fault of my own, have occurred in the last week:
- My Windows 11 PC inexplicably took twenty minutes to start up. There does not appear to be anything actually wrong with it. It has had every scan, virus check, hardware tweak imaginable run, and has had Windows completely reinstalled multiple times. Once Windows starts, it is mostly fine, with the following exception:
- When browsing the Internet, occasionally both Firefox and Chrome will just… stop doing anything, to such a degree that they prevent the rest of Windows from doing anything. Checking logs indicates that nothing is particularly happening on the CPU, memory, storage or network front whenever this happens, it just… happens. Firefox does it marginally less than Chrome did, thus I have switched to Firefox.
- When using my computer to browse Nextdoor, which is a site that eventually paid off during our search for Oliver, scrolling down more than about a screen and a half will cause the entire website to completely shit the bed, moving its sidebar to the middle of the screen before snapping you back to the top of the feed you were attempting to scroll through.
- When using my phone to browse Nextdoor, a post where someone said the bin men had just been and not taken their bin remained at the top of my feed for the entire three weeks that Oliver was missing.
- My keyboard just told me it had "low battery" despite being plugged in. I unplugged it and replugged it in and now it claims to have 98% battery.
- My keyboard doesn't charge while plugged in if I don't have the Razer software running.
- My mouse can have its wireless signal blocked by a packet of crisps.
- My PC game controller sometimes requires turning on three times before it's actually turned on.
- The Bluetooth on my work PC refuses to turn on despite showing as being present and working.
- When listening to YouTube videos while falling asleep, at least 8 times out of 10, the app will randomly close itself for no apparent reason in the middle of a video.
It's frustrating that, when you're someone who takes good care of their tech — as I always have been — stuff just… fucks up after a while for no apparent reason. My woes with Windows on my living room PC are a longstanding issue that I am at my absolute wits' end with; I am getting perilously close to installing Bazzite and being done with Windows, particularly now I no longer need to work on this machine. Oddly enough, I have had zero Windows-related issues with my work mini PC, other than the Bluetooth problem, which may well be hardware-related.
I just miss the time when you bought something that was expensive and fancy, that it worked, and it continued to work for many years after you spent lots of money on it. Still, I knew that age was long past all those years ago when I updated my iPhone 3G to the latest iOS and it became completely unusable. I still went and upgraded to an iPhone 4 like a big mug, though, didn't I? Twat.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
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